PEOPLE AND PROCESS: THE PANDEMIC SOLUTION
As shop owners, Greg Buckley and Travis Troy had the necessary steps in place to endure COVID-19
By Jordan Wiklund Photography courtesy Buckley’s Auto Care, Honest Wrenches
Pictured: Despite strict self-quarantine measures all other reasonable and state-led mandates, many of Greg Buckley’s family employees at Buckley’s Auto Care contracted coronavirus.
In a year loaded with the sorts of numbers nobody wants to see, here’s a score to rejoice about: MWACA Members 2, COVID 0.
That’s not to say there’s more to the story; there is, from MWACA members far and wide. But today the focus is on Greg Buckley, owner of Buckley’s Auto Care (Wilmington, DE), and Travis Troy, owner of Honest Wrenches (Des Moines, IA). Both shops followed state and federal shutdown guidelines; both owners contracted the virus; both have stories to share. There’s no accounting for unthinkable worldwide viruses, but there’s plenty of reasons to ensure your shop is prepared to handle the unexpected.
Enduring with Vision
When COVID struck last March, Greg Buckley’s normal life was 1,000 miles away—literally. He was in Phoenix in March 2020 when the country shut down, the entire country separating him from his wife, shop and normal life.
“I got caught in the hailstorm of airports shutting down,” he says, “and though I felt our team was prepared, we were guessing like everyone else. We didn’t know what kind of threat it posed—who’s to say?”
Upon return, his first thoughts went to his wife, whose autoimmune rheumatoid arthritis could put her at more risk. Nonetheless, they endured the onset like everyone else.
“We were protective and on-guard as much as possible; there’s no level of perfection you’re going to reach, so we did the best we could with what we had,” he says. “My wife, my team and most of my family were in a containment situation and we felt we were as close to safe as possible.”
Almost one year from the onset, Buckley’s son felt sick and tested positive. Then his parents. Finally, “it struck us like lightning.” As a mostly family-run shop, the line between employee and relation is thin. Luckily, Buckley felt comfortable with his son behind the counter and his nephew as the sole technician as the rest of the staff recovered. They called their customers and reduced their books, finishing up all existing work and slowly taking on more as the days passed and the afflicted recovered.
“You scratch your head as an owner and a leader,” he says, “and you ask yourself, ‘What could I have done differently?’ I don’t know. There’s not much value wondering why it happened.”
Buckley says he’d never seen anything run through a shop like the virus did; not the flu, not anything. “I just waited by the phone and the texts came in one by one,” he says, “positive, positive, positive.”
“We didn’t have much information on what was going on,” he continues, “and you’re in this storm of rhetoric complicated by politics. A hurricane of misinformation. I respected the virus, but I don’t know if I gave it enough respect. My attitude could have been a little less cavalier. We followed all the protocols. We tried to do the right thing. It didn’t matter.”
Still, it was process that Buckley credits with allowing the business to move forward despite some scary setbacks. Though his team was temporarily decimated, he already had processes in place to communicate internally and externally. The first week of his team’s COVID shutdown, the shop lost about $20,000 in revenue; not great, but not as debilitating as others endured.
Reflecting on the whole experience, Buckley believes his shop, his family and his community will be better for it.
“There isn’t going to be a single person who won’t reflect on this period without some sort of different perspective,” he says. “The times we’ve endured, the mental stress and conditions of many individuals is severely compromised. We’ll need a year of self-centering, and it might not even be this year. I hope we move into a calmer situation.
Pictured: Though business dwindled as the staff reduced to almost nothing, Buckley was able to keep a small book and soon ran at 100 percent capacity
Many owners have had to re-define mission, principle and purpose. And it’s healthy. That’s what the next phase of all this will be.”
Despite the challenges this year has posed, Buckley anticipates breaking a sales record or coming awfully close. He’s still working the numbers and anticipating the used car and repair/maintenance market to thrive.
“As shop owners, we’ve all become better, smarter and hopefully more profitable owners. Many are raising rates, looking at numbers, extracting the best value out of each car. We have a lot in our favor,” he says, “and this summer and beyond, it’s off to the races.”
Coming Full Circle
When Troy appeared in the first issue of MWACA Magazine, he was a new father and hoped to one day open a second shop. Just two years later, the story is much the same—he’s once again a new father, and the second shop is almost open, under construction in West Des Moines about 15 miles from the original Honest Wrenches.
“Before COVID, in November 2019, we were adding staff,” Troy says. They were planning to grow substantially by January 2020, and despite the pandemic, Honest Wrenches enjoyed a robust first quarter up until April and May 2020. Troy knew business would pick up over the summer, and planned for another dip in the fall, exactly matching the resurgence of the virus.
“We had set up financially to be able to get through everything OK. We sat our staff down and were 100 percent transparent; the company is financially stable, and we’re going to make sure you guys are OK.”
Troy says that eased everyone considerably, and the staff wanted to do anything to avoid being sent home. So they undertook several shop projects to keep everyone on site and working, such as cutting down trees, cleaning and updating some interior areas and servicing much of the shop’s tools and equipment.
“We accomplished much of the honey-do list that as a business always gets pushed to the wayside. We even re-did the office floors,” he says. More importantly, though, Troy began thinking, What can I do as shop owner and leader? He realized he had two opportunities: first, to slow down and spend more time with his newly grown family; and second, to ensure the shop could run without him long after the pandemic is over.
So he looked to a common tool these days: Zoom. Instead of transcribing all his notes, he recorded himself speaking directly into the camera: how to do payroll. How to add a new employee. How to open up. How to shut down. Anything and everything that fell under his umbrella as owner now exists in the cloud and on his shop software.
It’s a good thing, too. Everything changed in November.
Nothing More Valuable than Time
“I don’t have a great idea how I contracted it,” Troy says. There was a spike at his daughter’s school when over 60 kids tested positive. His four-week-old son tested positive, yet nobody in his shop had COVID; Troy says he’s not there very often so he wasn’t as worried about his staff.
He lost taste. He lost smell. His breathing worsened, and he was finally hauled to the hospital at 4 AM on the back of a stretcher.
“I was MIA in the hospital,” he says. “I was on 70 liters of oxygen and it was bad.” Nonetheless, Honest Wrenches endured because of his proactive approach to managing; the videos he made guided the staff and his second-in-command through many of the duties they only had marginal parts in before the virus struck.
“Those videos and that instruction allowed me to heal with minimal communication,” he says.
“Thank God it dawned on me to do something to ensure the longevity of my shop and my people; I realized that I was the guy between the staff and their paychecks, and almost immediately after, I contracted the coronavirus.”
Troy says he wasn’t normal until the new year and doesn’t know what to expect long-term (just like everyone else). What he does expect, though, are some changes to his life and his business.
“What COVID showed me was how little time I had spent with my family before; I’m a go-getter, and it was easier than I thought to put that aside and spend more time with my family. I decided to achieve a better balance, and I’m going to ensure that my staff has adequate time to spend with their families, even though I wasn’t exactly the poster child for it.
“That’s going to change,” Troy says, “and that’s a big deal for me.”
When asked what other takeaways his experience taught him, he pauses. His breathing, now regular and slow, is audible.
“COVID showed me we have the right people,” he says.
“What that did was galvanize me to do so much more for them—I know they’re willing to do anything for me and the shop. A second location wouldn’t be possible without them.”
And as we move into the second COVID summer, both Buckley and Troy plan to take even less for granted. Nothing is guaranteed—neither your health nor your business—but surrounding yourself with the right people can carry you far, even through the toughest times. Even—especially—through COVID-19.
Pictured: Construction is almost complete at Troy’s second Honest Wrenches location in West Des Moines, Iowa.